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Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Multi Core vs Single Core

Single core processors are a thing of the past. Everything is advancing fast and the amount of data that needs to be transfered gets bigger and bigger, thats why faster and more capable processors are needed.

Why multi core

Processors have a clock rate ( one sine wave transferring data ) which is measured in Hertz. The technology of today cannot drive the clock rates very high ( highest 8.429 GHz on AMD's Bulldozer based FX chip ), because it becomes very expensive and difficult, and to compensate the need for capacity, they simply add cores or threads with lower clock rates.

Cores can have multiple threads, which act as separate processors, but actually they are inside the processor's core. Threads can perform tasks in parallel with eatch other.Multiple cores are needed in movie editing and rendering, or any task that needs a lot of calculating and data processing/transferring power.

Intel Quad core i7

Intel Single core Celeron

Most common multi cores are Dual and Quad ( 2 and 4 ), but there are also a lot of Hexa and Octa ( 6 and 8 ) cores among desktop computers.